In Past Show

About David Knowlton

In paintings that toe the line between abstraction and representation, David Knowlton focuses on the architecture, infrastructure, and machinery of the American Southwest and Midwest. After living in New Mexico for 15 years, painting its inimitable, Spanish-style buildings set into rolling scrub and desert vistas, he returned to his home state of Wisconsin, where he paints the farmsteads, factories, bridges, and trains marking the flat landscape. Working in oil, he emphasizes the lush thickness of the paint in his compositions’ textured surfaces. While in his earlier works he rendered his subjects in precise detail, his move back to Wisconsin spurred a pared down approach. Like the Precisionists, whose works his own resemble, Knowlton foregrounds the volumes and planes of his architectural and industrial subjects, so that they appear as abstract, austere, geometrical forms against planar bands of grass and sky.